I’m a fan of the band Otep, an alternative metal band with an angry lesbian singer who goes by the name, Otep Shamaya. They have several songs I’m not so keen on and a bunch that I absolutely love. I’m also not so keen on the fact that Ms. Otep gets dramatic and preachy on stage, on their albums, and on the internet. At one point, back when myspace was relevant, I deleted the band from my friends list because I got tired of the constant barrage of political bulletins they posted. I assume it’s all her, but I don’t really know. Today I saw this from Otep on facebook: “If we have money to pay “contractors” like Blackwater, we have the money to give our Soldiers a RAISE.”

1. There is no reason to put the term “contractors” in quotes.

2. We don’t have the money to pay them. In case you haven’t noticed, the US government is running a major budget deficit, contributing to a massive debt that cannot realistically be repaid.

3. Contractors like Blackwater are in it for the money, clearly. It’s a racket. So are soldiers who voluntarily enlist knowing they’ll be sent to fight a bullshit war. They just lack the experience to get the better paying gig.

4. US soldiers get paid pretty well, especially on hot deployments, and especially considering the lack of work experience and skill that most go in with.

5. Soldiers are enablers. They allow the assholes in charge to do the horrible things they wish to do. If it weren’t for the volunteers, the ruling elite would have a lot more difficulty in achieving their awful goals.

I spent four years in the US Army, and don’t see why I deserve any respect for living off of taxpayers for all that time while I provided nothing in return. I hate bring this up because I hate the positive reaction it gets. I don’t regret it or feel bad about it, but I’m not proud of it either. There’s really nothing to be proud of. Playing war and driving humvees was fun for me, but it was of no benefit to taxpayers. I’m glad I never went anywhere hot and never had to kill or witness violent death. Having grown up in a society sprinkled with jobless, homeless, and mentally ill Vietnam vets, it kills me to know the process that created such men is at it again. I really think we’d be better off if fewer wounded combat vets survived. Several years ago, when I first realized that this was going on with a group of young men that are almost all younger than me, I teared up and I don’t do that.

I can’t support these guys and highly discourage others from doing so and from joining the military at all.

I’ve given my general opinion on feminismbefore, but I’ve stayed away from what modern feminists are saying today largely because I think it’s more important to look at what feminism has already accomplished than to look at what silly nonsense modern feminists are blabbing about, especially when it seems that few young women are listening. I don’t mean to argue that these women can be safely ignored, though. I just think it’s more constructive to examine the effects of the social and legal changes of the last 40 years and attempt, where it seems prudent, to undo those changes. Still, I thought I’d try to dissect a modern feminist blog post, for once, just to see how that goes.

This one comes from Feministe.us and is called Shameful Behaviour. It’s a long-winded complaint about “slut-shaming” and “fat-shaming”, with basically no concrete examples of what those things are. It was written by a woman who goes by wickedday and was orignally posted at her blog, This Wicked Day. I don’t know if she’s fat or if she’s a slut, but her basic argument is that one person’s promiscuity or obesity are none of your business. She makes this claim without qualification, making no distinctions between anonymous internet “trolls” and people who might legitimately care about you. If I had a wife and cheated on her, I don’t think it would carry much weight for me to explain that what I did with my body was none of her business.

One of the historic and ongoing aims of feminism and feminist movements has been the attempt to eradicate what’s known in the feminist blogosphere as slut-shaming. Even if you’ve never seen the term before, you’ve almost certainly observed it in action: somebody or somebodies abusing someone else on the basis of their (real or imagined) sex life, where ‘acceptable’ levels and types of sexuality are a) wildly inconsistent and b) liable to change without notice (assuming anyone states them in the first place).

Shaming is a useful social tool. It is not abuse. Acceptable levels of sexual activity vary wildly in the West because of cultural diversity and modern views that differ greatly from traditional views. Here, I would like a better explanation of what they’re talking about. I have a real-world example.

A man in his twenties woke up one morning in the bed of Sarah, who he’d met the night before when Sarah’s sister knocked on the front door. She’d come to pick Sarah up and take her to her car that she’d left at the bar where the three had met. Sarah was unable to conceal the fact that her new friend was there with her, and when the two of them got in the car the she spelled out “W-H-O-R-E” (her kid was in the car). That’s some pretty blatant shaming, and I don’t really see anything wrong with it. In fact, I wish more women were subject to this sort of judging.

Of course, feminists insist that a woman is free to do as she wishes with her body, and that whatever she does should be of no consequence to anyone, but that simply isn’t the way of the world. Man or woman, actions have consequences. For many young women, there are little to no immediate negative consequences, but they occur eventually, and it might be helpful if someone around them warned them of this. Promiscuous behavior in women is often pathological, and a girl who sleeps around a lot is not a good candidate for a serious relationship. As rapper Kurupt said, “You can’t make a ho a housewife.” A man doesn’t have to be involved with too many different women to learn this.

Her example:

Take Sam. Sam is not any of the Sams I know; Sam is a purely imaginary person, who has had sex 20 times in the last year. That’s a number: a neutral statement. But twenty sexual encounters in a year will be read very differently depending on whether they were all with a long-term partner or with twenty one-night stands. Both those situations are also likely to be perceived differently depending on Hypothetical Sam’s sex, sexuality and gender. And race. And dis/ability status. And age.* And what exactly they were doing. And how many people were involved. Andtheir sex/race/age/etc. And fuck knows what else.

So what? A woman’s “slutiness” negatively impacts her desirability as a mate, and this isn’t really true with men. Complain all you want about this “double-standard”, but it’s part of our genetics and part of our culture because the material consequences of promiscuity are different for men and women. Man or a woman, what if Sam is married and cheated on his/her spouse two of those twenty times? Should that impact what we think of him/her? I can’t accept any cultural taboos against making such character judgments based on actions that actually tell us about someone’s character.

Slut-shaming is the shame directed at the many, many Sams who fall down, or who are alleged to have fallen down, on one of the myriad unstated Rules About Sex and are therefore designated as sluts. It happens less than it used to, but there’s still plenty of it, as is readily imaginable from the range of differing reactions to the cast of Sams posited above.

Before the feminist revolution, these rules were much more concrete. Girls were more likely to be taught by their parents/grandparents/clergymen which behaviors were socially acceptable and which were not, and what one girl heard was probably not all that different from what the girl next door was taught. Today, young women are told what is acceptable by feminists, Cosmo, Oprah, their clueless friends, and sometimes their often clueless mothers. Now, people who are part of the same society (especially the internet society) have wildly differing views on what’s normal or acceptable.

The practical argument against slut-shaming is simple: it doesn’t work. […]

The difficulty of persuading people to give up something that they want, that they enjoy, and that in itself is harming nobody means that pundits in the business of persuading people to do so – whether they represent a religion, a political party, or any other organisation – have a tendency to fall back on faux-altruistic yammering about your physical and/or mental health. Here on the internet, we call them concern trolls. Theirs is the argument that goes “But if you do X you’ll get mocked/pregnant/ill/injured/killed/sent to hell/never find true love!! I only want the best for you!!”

Pundits? Is that who this is about? If the shaming comes from family members or close friends, as in my example above, can we safely assume the concern isn’t genuine? There could be other motives, but I don’t think we can dismiss authentic concern. Where the people do not know each other, a “concern troll” might simply be trying to convince others that there are negative consequences to sexual promiscuity. While this is different than genuine concern, it’s not dishonest.

[…]

The more I think about it, the more I think that the best answer to the concern-trolling “But we’re shaming you because we care!” line is “What the fuck is it to do with you? Did I ask for opinions on my sex life? Why are you even here? In fact, who the hell are you and why are you so freakishly interested in what I do in bed?”

It all depends on who you’re talking to and why you’re talking about such things. If it’s your mom or dad, it’s their job to care. If you’re promoting promiscuity on the internet, you’ve invited the argument. It would be very helpful to have a concrete example of the slut-shaming that elicits such a response from the author.

[…]

The only focus of outside interest should be on ensuring that nobody gets harmed: if it’s satisfactorily established that no nonconsenting parties are getting harmed, then everything else is A-OK.

It may harm non-consenting parties (children, significant others) in the sense that drug abuse harms others, but there are no victims in a criminal legal sense. I would argue in either case that free individuals ought to have a legal right to do as they wish with their bodies, but they are not entitled to do so without being shamed for it. Importantly, that consenting parties may be harming themselves (as humans are often prone to do) is the impetus for concern.

I say ‘nonconsenting’ there, surplus though it may seem, because you can consent to harm. […] Smokers abuse their lungs, drinkers abuse their livers, athletes their joints, motorcyclists and cliff divers put themselves voluntarily and joyously at risk.

So, following the logic that people should be able to do as they wish without being shamed, we can also conclude that people have a right not to be cautioned against or shamed for any of the above activities. Now, I think it’s rude and pointless to caution strangers against the dangers of smoking when they already know about them, but how do you feel about a parent who pleads with their adult child to quit smoking or to get treatment for their alcoholism?

After this she summarizes this all as something she considers a central tenet of feminism – the principle of bodily autonomy, “my body, my business” and tries to stuff the god-awful “fat acceptance movement” under its umbrella. Yuck.

Food and sex share certain characteristics. Notably, they are both strong instinctual drives – eat or die; fuck or die out – that (most) humans find pleasure in, as well as simple satiety. Both have innumerable variations. People’s tastes vary wildly: in both kitchen and bedroom, what makes X swoon will make Y vomit.

It’s interesting to, for once, have some acknowledgement that genetics drive human behavior, but what’s she getting at?

Perhaps because of those similarities, modern society is weird about food in the same way as it’s weird about sex. The rhetoric of health directed at fat people bears striking resemblances to the equally hollow rhetoric directed at people having sex: it’s all about how you’re putting yourself attremendous risk of disease and death and ruining your life prospects – oh, and probably never being able to find love.

First of all, people are not shamed for having sex per se, but for being promiscuous. Neither are they shamed for eating or enjoying food, but for being fat, and overeating is not the primary cause of obesity, even though most people believe it to be. I don’t see obesity as a cause of disease, death, or poor health, but it’s a strong sign of having a poor diet which does cause such things. And of course, being significantly fat is the number one way for people to ensure a very low value in the sexual marketplace.

Fat-shaming concern-trolling is almost always couched in the language of health. Fat is unhealthy! You’ll die of heart disease! Or diabetes! Or both! And once again, as with the slut-shamers, I have to answer with a resounding “. . . And?”

No, seriously, why are you concerned? What’s it to you? Why the hell does it matter to you so much? You don’t know me. You have no personal emotional stake in my wellbeing. My health is, in fact, of no possible consequence to you. My body: not your business.

Once again, it seems that this is directed entirely at anonymous internet “trolls”, but it is quite reasonable for people to be concerned for the health of people they care about. And really, I see nothing wrong with actually being concerned with the health of strangers, especially in the aggregate. My general concern with such a large number of women being fat is that it ruins the dating pool for us men. Grossly overweight people are also quite the eyesore and they take up a lot of space in crowded places. Further, there’s a lot of confusion about what causes obesity, and it frustrates me that obesity is largely the result of poor diet and poor understanding of what causes and prevents the accumulation of body fat in humans. “If only people knew!”

The usual response to the hard-to-argue-with point that my body != your business this is the argument from government, as it were. The argument that, because we live under the same healthcare system, this somehow makes it your business – your tax money is being spent repairing myfragile arteries, or whatever, and this is apparently grossly unjust and I’m depriving cancer patients of their drugs or something.

Such is the moral hazard of socialized healthcare, or socialized anything really. As evidenced by the spelling of “Behaviour” in the title, we’re apparently dealing with someone in the UK. That’s really all I have to say about that argument. What follows is hardly worth a response:

Being aware of where your tax is going is a good thing. But wanting my tax to cover your health needs, whilst simultaneously fulminating against your tax helping to cover mine, is stupid, and arrogant – and, when combined with hand-wringing over Britain Getting Fatter or how the French are skinnier or whatever, tends to lead into jingoism. Who actually cares what nation tops the average-weight list? Why is it so damn important to people that the country they happen to be a citizen of has to be the best at everything?

What a stupid thing to complain about! Such things are worth looking into, especially (as with anything else) if you find them interesting. If you notice that the French are thinner on average, you might wonder why. If you investigate this, you might actually learn something useful. After that she offers statist-socialist counter-solutions for the problems identified by slut-shamers and fat-shamers:

[…]Things like free contraceptives, free care, good sex ed including the emotional side of things, good and accurate information on all kinds of sex and how to have them safely. Friendly environments. An end to public sex-hostility. An end to judging people based on their sex lives, maybe, even.

These suggestion are of no use to slut-shamers as they do nothing to curb female promiscuity, which is their intent.

A similar list of things applies to health. If we eliminated food deserts, made cities more walkable, reduced pollution, enforced better food standards, cut a working week so that people actually had time to cook, taught decent cooking in school, tightened up the regulations surrounding advertising re: body image and diets, and maybe stopped viewing food-as-pleasure as some sort of mortal sin, probably you’d have a lot more healthy people . . . of all sizes, natch.

After trying to argue in favor of “fat acceptance” she acknowledges that obesity is a problem when she suggests solutions for it. I wonder if the solutions are to be implemented via legislation or some sort of social movement.

On July 25, Wikileaks released 76,000 pages of classified documents relating to US operations in Afghanistan. This pissed off the folks at the Pentagon, claiming the release of such information put the lives of US troops and US allies in Afghanistan at risk. This hardly bothers me. I haven’t read any of the documents, but my understanding is that none of them contained any timely intel. Rather, they could apparently make certain people upset, leading to a change in behavior toward US troops and allies. Sending these folks to Afghanistan is what put them at risk.

Around the middle of last month, Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, went to Sweden where he spoke at a seminar organised by the Social Demoratic Party. He also, apparently, filed for a permanent work Visa, probably to avoid returning to the US, where he might someday face charges for the leaks. While there, he had a fling with two different women who later found out about each other and decided they were victims. Together, they went to a police station and told their stories. They both were concerned about the possibility of having contracted an STD, and the younger one wanted to find out how or if she could force Assange to be tested. It seems that they did not intend to accuse him of rape, but according to this story at the Daily Mail:

…the police woman at the reception and two male officers, one from the sex crimes unit, believed there was enough evidence to call the female duty prosecutor, who issued the warrants.

But then:

The story was leaked to a Swedish tabloid and Assange’s high profile led to the case being taken over by a senior female prosecutor who, after reading the statements, concluded there was no evidence of rape.

However:

She agreed to the sexual molestation charge related to the first woman, but even that was watered down last week. Some legal observers now believe that will also disappear.

“There is reason to believe that a crime has been committed,” read a statement from Marianne Ny, Sweden’s director of public prosecutions. “Considering information available at present, my judgment is that the classification of the crime is rape.”

If you read the Daily Mail article, the source for my above summary, this seems highly absurd. How did this happen?

Swedish authorities arrested Assange “in absentia” last month on charges of rape and molestation. The chief prosecutor later revoked the arrest warrant and dropped the rape charge. The charges came from two separate women.

The lawyer for both women appealed, asking for the rape charge to be reinstated and the molestation charge to be upgraded to include a sexual component.

For clarification, the molestation charge was comparable to a harassment charge in the US. So, these two women got a lawyer who somehow convinced prosecutors to reopen a case where there isn’t even an allegation of a crime, let alone evidence. These women were upset with Julian for fucking them and later not calling them. I really don’t think that’s a crime, not even in Sweden. Back to the Daily Mail Article:

Woman A, who works for the Christian branch of the party, was the main organiser but they had never met before.

The attractive twentysomething, described by friends as hardworking and fun-loving, offered to let him stay in her one-bedroom flat in Sodermalm, Stockholm.

She planned to visit her family on the other side of the country and would be away until the Saturday seminar.

But she returned on the Friday, anxious about the amount of work still to do for the seminar.

According to a police source: ‘They had a discussion and decided it would be OK to share the living space, then went out together for dinner.

‘When they got back they had sexual relations, but there was a problem with the condom – it had split.

‘She seemed to think that he had done this deliberately but he insisted that it was an accident.’

Whatever her views about the incident, she appeared relaxed and untroubled at the seminar the next day where Assange met Woman B, another pretty blonde, also in her 20s, but younger than Woman A.

This is all based on the police reports. Woman A is apparently the molestation “victim”, but I don’t see how.

Woman B described how, in the wake of the Afghanistan leaks, she saw Assange being interviewed on television and became instantly fascinated – some might even say obsessed.

She said she thought him ‘interesting, brave and admirable’.

Over the following two weeks she read everything she could find about him on the internet and followed news reports about his activities.

She discovered that he would be visiting Sweden to give a seminar, so she emailed the organisers to offer her help.

She registered to attend and booked the Saturday off work.

She appears to have dressed to catch his eye, in a shocking-pink cashmere jumper. But, she says, among the grey-suited journalists who filled the room, she felt uncomfortably out of place.

Undeterred, she bagged a seat in the front row and was asked to buy a computer cable for Assange.

No one bothered to thank her, she later complained.

Assange, dressed in grey jeans and a suit jacket, spoke earnestly for 90 minutes on the theme ‘The first victim of war is the truth’.

He could not have failed to notice the attractive blonde taking photographs of him.

Later, geek game:

Assange seemed pleased to have such an ardent admirer fawning over him and, she said, would look at her ‘now and then’. Eventually he took a closer interest.

She explained in her statement that he was tucking into cheese served on Swedish crispbread when she asked if he thought it was good.

Assange looked at her directly and started to feed her.

His next move was pure computer geek – he told her that he needed a charger for his laptop, and she eagerly offered to help.

Assange smiled, put his arm around her back and said: ‘Ah yes, it was you who gave me a cable.’

They went on a vain search for the charger. She bought him a travel card for the metro because he said he didn’t have any money.

[…]

At 6pm they entered a bijou cinema to watch a short film about the ocean, called Deep Sea. In the darkness Assange became amorous.

At one point they moved to the back row, where it is clear from the woman’s statement that the pair went far beyond kissing and fondling.

After the show, they wandered towards a park. He turned to her and said: ‘You are very attractive … to me.’ [Oh, how smooth!]

Assange said he had a traditional Swedish crayfish party to attend and needed a power nap, so they lay side by side on the grass and he fell asleep.

She stayed awake and woke him about 20 minutes later. When she asked if they would meet again, he replied: ‘Of course.’

What he did not tell her was that the party was being hosted by the woman he had slept with two nights before and whose bed he would probably be sleeping in that night.

By the time she had arrived home, 46 miles outside Stockholm, and charged her mobile phone, there was a message from Assange asking her to call.

He was still at the party.

The next day Woman B tried to call him but his phone was turned off. She eventually spoke to him on the Monday when he agreed to meet her in the evening and suggested they spend the night at her flat.

She wanted to go to a hotel, but he said he would like to see her home.

Again she bought his £10 train ticket because he had no cash and said he didn’t want to use his credit card in case his movement was being tracked.

He spent most of the 45-minute journey surfing the internet on his laptop, reading stories about himself and twittering or texting on his mobile phone.

‘He paid more attention to the computer than to me,’ she said bitterly.

Remember that this is all supposedly coming from the police reports. Sweden has a rape shield law, a law that protects the identity of accusers of rape. They have not been interviewed because their identities are shielded from the press. They will not even tell Assange or his lawyer who these women are, though I suspect he knows.

It was dark by the time they arrived in her suburb and the atmosphere between them had cooled.

‘The passion and attraction seemed to have disappeared,’ she said.

Most of what then followed has been blacked out in her statement, except for: ‘It felt boring and like an everyday thing.’

One source close to the investigation said the woman had insisted he wear a condom, but the following morning he made love to her without one.

This was the basis for the rape charge. But after the event she seemed unruffled enough to go out to buy food for his breakfast.

Apparently, having sex without a condom in Sweden is rape. Doesn’t that cheapen the term to something pretty meaningless? Like when someone steals sex from a prostitute and it’s called rape?

Her only concern was about leaving him alone in her flat. ‘I didn’t feel I knew him very well,’ she explained.

They ate in an atmosphere that was tense, though she said in her statement that she tried to lighten the mood by joking about the possibility that she might be pregnant.

They parted on friendly terms and she bought his train ticket back to Stockholm. When she asked if he would call, he said: ‘Yes, I will.’

But he did not and neither did he answer her calls.

This is the real basis for the rape charge.

The drama took a bizarre and ultimately sensational turn after she called the office of Woman A, whom she had briefly met at the seminar.

The two women talked and realised to their horror and anger that they had both been victims of his charm.

The issue of unprotected sex left a fear of disease. It is believed that they both asked him to take a test for STDs and he refused.

Woman B was especially anxious about the possibility of HIV and pregnancy.

And it was in this febrile state that the women, who barely knew each other, walked into a police station and began to tell their stories.

…And the rest is history, or should be. Now, I’m looking at the same story at Gawker.com and they were saying that woman A is Anna Ardin, the political secretary and press officer of the Swedish “Brotherhood Movement.”

Anna Ardin:

Woman B:

False rape accusations get a lot of attention in the MRA world, as far as I can tell, these women never actually accused Assange of rape. They accused him of not calling, not paying for his own train-fare, and not using a condom. These non-crimes were then twisted into a rape charge through some mental effort that I can’t quite understand. Is there a term for this?